Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The climate’s changing,
almost certainly due to CO2 emissions. 97% of the world’s climate scientists
agree that we’ll have to leave most of the carbon fuels in the ground to avoid
dangerous global warming; but of course the fossil fuel corporations don’t want
to do that, and they are rich and powerful and (like all corporations)
sociopathic.

But it occurs to me
that if those corporations are sociopathic enough to betray all of civilization
for short-term gain, then they are also sociopathic enough to betray each other for long-term gain. I therefore offer this Modest Proposal: that some
one of those corporations do the following:

1. Sell all of their
still-productive wells and mines to their competitors;

2. Invest heavily in
renewable energy;

3. Switch sides in the
climate-change debate. Specifically, bribe the legislatures to mandate leaving most
of the coal, gas and oil in the ground.

In short, sell off
their wasting assets to their rivals, then pay the State to forbid them from
using those assets! What a sweet scam!

Comments:

1. I think ‘renewable
energy’ should really be called ‘owned power’. If you own a geothermal well, or
a solar farm, or a wind farm, then you have a license to print money; whereas
any power source requiring fuel is at the mercy of outsiders. Really, fueled
power should be called ‘rented’ power. Owned power is a source of endless power
in both the physical and political senses.

2. Wind and solar are
on the rise, but they’re intermittent, and so require either grid coordination
(and hence are not really owned power) or storage batteries (an underdeveloped
tech, needing R&D and investment). However, for the purpose of corporate
treason, I think deep geothermal is poetically appropriate, for it uses the
same deep-drilling tech they now are developing to chase after vanishing oil.

3. I see that the
Rockefeller foundation is divesting from fossil fuels, and switching sides on
the AGW debate. That is, they are following my corporate-treason advice! No-one
should ever accuse the Rockefellers of lack of adaptability.

Monday, September 29, 2014

The climate’s changing
rapidly lately, almost certainly due to CO2 emissions, but nothing will be done
because the fossil fuels corporations are rich and powerful and (like all
corporations) sociopathic. The process will probably go to completion, come
hell or high water. (Likely both!)

So the way forward is
adaptation. How to climate-proof civilization? We’ll have to rebuild it anyhow,
once the seas rise and flood out the coastal cities. So billions will pack and
move uphill, but to what?

I propose that we move
as much as possible indoors, where we have climate control. In economic terms,
this is ‘import substitution’ for the city. Import substitution is pricy but a
long-term winning strategy.

Water will be a
problem. Too much here, too little there. But there’s desalinization, and there’s
pulling water from the air. Neither has been done much; rivers and rain are
cheaper; but if those become unreliable or unpredictable, then we’ll just have
to pay up. Forced technical evolution.

As long as I’m
fantasizing about closed systems, let me put in a good word for the plasma
torch. Feed your city’s waste stream into it and zap everything down to atoms.
So long dioxin and viruses. Out of it comes ‘fuel gas’ = CO + H2, a feedstock
for fuel, fertilizer and plastic. Put the fertilizer into the hydroponics, and
that’s a closed loop.

The plasma torch also
emits ‘slag’, which is a mix of all the other elements. Nowadays they put this
into a clay-lined landfill, but I say we send the plasma through a
mass-spectrometer, and get out pure elements, ready for industrial use. How’s
that for recycling?

While we’re at it let’s
separate out the radioisotopes, for radiological cleanliness and industrial
use. For instance, put a pinch of C14 into a glass sphere doped with phosphors,
and you’ve got a light that’ll shine for millennia.

All of this is
energy-intensive, and we’re running out of fossil fuels, which is forcing
climate change. Solar and wind are fine, and getting cheaper, but I cannot
imagine technologies more vulnerable to climate change. Also they’re
intermittent, and they have a big footprint. The intermittency can be cured by
efficient energy storage, but this tech needs invention and investment. The
land footprint might create land-use conflicts. Turf wars; how retro.

Old-style nukes have
repeatedly disgraced themselves; but I hear good things about LFTR (liquid
fluoride thorium reactor). But even nukes are fuel-based, which is not what I
have in mind. So I was wondering about deep geothermal. Small footprint,
continuous, zero-emission if done right. Can this be done affordably at
gigawatt scale? Note that the drilling technology it needs is now being
pioneered by the chase after ever-deeper oil.

Put it all together:
deep geothermal power, plasma torch recycling, vertical hydroponic farms, water
pulled from the air. Put it all under an air-conditioned geodesic dome and
voila; a city you can plant anywhere. Climate change? Droughts, hurricanes,
high seas, desertification, lethal hot-and-humid heat-shock weather? Who cares?
It’s the Anthropocene, baby, get with the program.

Do note that most of
these technologies will also be useful in space. Or put it this way; future
Earth might become an alien planet. You can’t go home again.

Perhaps you, dear
readers, know cheaper ways to climate-proof civilization. And probably I’m
missing some necessary techs. And no doubt there will be political effects from
all this technological centralization. If it’s heat-shock weather outside the
dome, then you don’t want to be kicked out of town.

Not everyone can afford
to build a climate-proof city. So how to live low-tech in the Anthropocene?

Friday, September 19, 2014

“Paid for how much?Enough for the jobless to live on, with a little bit more for small
luxuries.”

Let’s just admit defeat, and recognize that the jobs
are never coming back.

“A stipend stabilizes society by giving everyone a
stake in the system.”

Everyone except for the taxpayers.

“... this amounts to plutocracy insurance; buying
off the poor to quash rebellion.”

A stipend like that will not calm down the
masses.Here’s why.

“Some radicals say, ‘We do not propose to abolish
wealth.We say, abolish poverty.’The fact is you cannot abolish poverty
without abolishing wealth.For wealth is
relative.One can be sensible of it only
in contrast with poverty.What is
poverty?What is wealth?There is no absolute measure.Only contrast.In that hut over there the people seem
wretchedly poor.That is because
habitations have improved.Not long ago,
historically speaking, the royal family would have lived in a hut like that.The king himself.The poor now have more than the rich had a
few generations ago, more of everything to eat and wear and enjoy.They are none the less torn by envy because
others have more.” -- from “Harangue” by Garet Garrett

PMA:

That’s not defeat. That’s victory over the curse of
Adam.

Of course we are approaching an economics of
superfluity; it has been visible for a century.

Robots are how industrial man proposes to achieve
hunter-gatherer man’s liberty along with farmer man’s security.

But also agreed that envy and ambition will remain,
despite everyone having full bellies. The natural strife of society will not
decrease with the abolition of absolute poverty. Man is born to trouble, sure
as sparks flying upwards. Relative rich and relative poor will remain; in fact
I am counting on them remaining, for then competition and innovation will also
remain.

If you get a pet rock, then that does decrease the
value of my pet rock; but your not going hungry does not decrease the value of
my not going hungry. So not all wealth is relative.

BJ; what you denounce is state-based welfare; you
don’t have to pay for it, but there’s only one choice. What I propose is a
market-based stipend; each gets a sum to spend as they wish. If we are to do a
Keynesian counter-cyclic stimulus at all, then the poorest are the best
dispensers of the stimulus money; they’ll spend it all, as efficiently as
possible, on what they need most. Thus the economy gets going, in a direction
closest approximating filling real needs, for the poorest are the ones most
uncomfortably aware of real needs.

Funding the stipend? Nontrivial! Doing it right?
(i.e. enough to live on, phases out slowly enough for work to pay) Also
nontrivial! But I submit that in a sense all of civilization is an immense
stipend. Civilization dispenses certain benefits to all, rich or poor, worthy
or unworthy, free of charge or scrutiny. That’s the point of civilization.

Oh and one more thing; a point of nomenclature. In
the first stipend essay, I described the stipend-receivers (i.e. the poorest)
as being “paid to consume”, and thus as “job creators”. This is factually
accurate; consumers _are_ the job creators, by definition; they are the ones
whom the jobs are done for. Now, there also exists another economic class, also
called “job creators”; but this is an Orwellian reversal, for the CEOs thus
described make their fortune by _destroying_ jobs, by automation, outsourcing
and other tactics. Their drive for efficiency increases output, so they do have
a role; but that role should not be mis-stated. They are job destroyers; that
is their job; one which lately they have done very, very well.

BJ:

The problem is that the stipends AREN’T free,
whether they are “invade Iraq” “goodies” or “Publik Skoolz” ”goodies” and as
you’ve probably figured from my sarcasm, there’s a serious argument as to
whether they’re valued anywhere close to the cost.They may even be valued NEGATIVELY.So if a person’s money is stolen for a Public
Schooling for their kid, andthey DON’T
value the public schooling anywhere NEAR what it cost them in taxes, or even at
all, or they would even pay to avoid it, even if their kid DIDN’T go to school
at all, then the money they’re spending on private schools may be like the
money we have to spend on guns when Bill Clinton gives us “night basketball” or
some other nonsense.That sort of “free
market Keynesianism” you’re discussing sounds more like Disaster Capitalism to
me.

LF:

Hmmmm.I’ve
been a Welfare worker and I’ve been a Welfare client (“I’ve looked at Welfare
from both sides now...”), and I can tell you from my own observation that
people on a stipend do not cease being productive if they have any health at
all.I’ve seen old Black grannies save
up their Welfare money to buy yarn and needles, knit everything from blankets
to dresses, and sell the same for a profit at a yard-sale.I’ve seen Welfare unemployeds fighting for
places in line to sign up for factory jobs.I’ve seen others take up underground and illegal jobs --
numbers-running, drug-selling, whoring -- to make extra bucks.I’ve seen ADC mothers buy seed and plant
backyard gardens to improve their children’s diets, and then swap the excess
with neighbors.In my own case, Rasty
and I are living on Social Security, and doing our damndest to plant a
fruit-orchard.What all these examples
have shown me is that being on a guaranteed stipend does not necessarily create
dependency, and certainly doesn’t stop people from being productive.

As an Anarchist, I’d have to say that, when
dismantling a government, we should leave the stipend for the poor to the very
last.Given a free and intelligent
society, there would be few enough really poor people that the “stipend” could
be maintained by private (which includes group, don’t forget) charity.